3 Comments

Congratulations to Dr. Moschovakis for his church land proposal. There’s plenty of precedent for agrarian reform and its beneficial effects. In the case of Greece, distributing ecclesiastical land to landless Greeks would be a boon on job creation, reinvigorating of villages all over the country, and possible national food self-reliance. But the question remains: will “socialist” PASOK do something that is democratic and just for the rural people of the country like giving those who are capable and willing land to raise food? After all, why should the church own more land than it needs to raise food? For example, the monastery of St. Gerasimos in Kephalonia owns the only small valley near the village Valsamata. Why should that be the case? The monastery makes millions from the twice-a-year festival. The bishop is a very wealthy man. The monastery is run by a few nuns. So the land is completely unnecessary for the well being of the monastery or the bishop. Wouldn’t it be a Christian act of kindness if the monastery and the bishop donated all that land to those who want to farm for a living? But I doubt that such thought ever crosses the mind of the bishop of Kephalonia or other Greek bishops who indulge in strictly business affairs. Which is why the state has to intervene and take the land away from them for the welfare of the Greeks.
Evaggelos Vallianatos, Ph.D.
Claremont, CA, USA

2010/3/17

Dear all,

It would seem that Greece is one of few European States not to put Church property to public use. To give you a few examples of what happened elsewhere in Europe, consider that confiscation of Church property occurred in Germanic statelets (the so-called Holy Roman Empire) sometime between 1525 and 1547. At a more modest scale, even if in rather dramatic fashion, it had earlier happened in France at the times of Philip IV who rounded up the knights templar on Friday the 13th, 1307 confiscated the order’s wealth and burnt several of its members including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay at the stake in 1314. For an encore, this time on a larger scale, Church land was secularized with the law of 2 December 1789 (the first year of the French revolution). The same thing happened in England where Henry the 8th dissolved the monasteries (1536–1540) and transferred a fifth of England’s landed wealth to new hands. The case of Spain is even closer to our present woes (and their solution through the confiscation of church property). Charles IV (1788-1808) ordered the Church to sell some of its property and to loan the proceeds to the government. A bit later, during the first half of the nineteenth century, almost all male religious orders were banned, over 1,500 monasteries shut down, much of their property sold to the public without compensation for the clergy and the proceeds were used to service the national debt.

Some people never recover from their brainwashing in their undergraduate years…forgetting about a whole universe of transcendent philosophical and historical work in a long Hellenic and Christian tradition that students are no longer exposed to in our secularized society and its institutions.

If your announcement below means that it was axed from the Acropolis Museum, I say it was about time. I saw the movie in the museum and my impression was that Gavras was fixated on making a point on an opinion or a belief of his and he did it through the introduction of historical inaccuracies in the film.